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InSERSSIili 8M OrTOSSXY. 



A REPLY 



BY 



Rev. Edward Bryan. 



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PRICE, 



TEN CENTS. 



INGERSOLL 

ON 

ORTHODOXY 



' A REPLY 

BY 

REV. EDWARD BRYAN. 



"without god we are lonely throughout eternity; but if we 
god we are more warmly, more intimately, more steadfastly 
united than by friendship and love."— Jean Paul Richter. 



BRADFORD, PA. 
W. F. JORDAN £r CO. 

1884. 



This Reply was originally given by the author on the two suc- 
cessive Sunday evenings of June 2 2d and 29th, 1884, in the First 
Presbyterian Church of this city, of which he is pastor. The 
interest which it aroused being unsatisfied with the necessarily in- 
complete reports which appeared in the columns of the Daily Era, 
it is now given to the public in its present form without abridg- 
ment. 

The Publishers. 

Bradford, Pa., September 10, 1884. 



Copyright, 1884, by Rev. Edward Bryan. 
All Rights Reserved. 



INGERSOLL ON ORTHODOXY. 



I propose to reply, this evening, to a lecture on " Orthodoxy " re- 
cently delivered in this city by Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, and to 
which I performed the duty, for such I considered it (and in common 
with many others who were present I can not say I had the pleasure), 
of listening. Some object to Mr. Ingersoll on account of his blas- 
phemy, others because they think he is not really sincere in what he 
says; but I wish the weight of what I say to-night to lie in the 
direction of an impeachment of Mr. Ingersoll's lecture as a defective 
intellectual production. I do not relish controversy, and do not 
seek it; but I simply can not live in this community, preaching the 
truths of the Bible, and not reply and protest when those truths are 
defamed. 

Thomas Carlyle has said: "That, with superstition, religion is 
also passing away, seems to us an entirely ungrounded fear. 
Religion can not pass away. The burning of a little straw may 
hide the stars of the sky; but the stars are there and will reappear. 
On the whole, we must repeat the oft repeated saying that it is un- 
worthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm 
or aversion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope and 
brotherly commiseration." 

In this spirit I desire to regard Mr. Ingersoll, and I hope that 
nothing I may say will be interpreted as an unkind or resentful or 
vindictive utterance, for I concede that an honest infidel— and I do 
not deny that there are such — is likely to have just as sensitive feel- 
ing as you or I. But I ask you to remember that this is a 



6 



reply, not an attack; the contest is not begun by me. As a recog- 
nized religious teacher I stand to-night on the defensive. If, 
then, I see fit to employ the weapon of satire or sharp rebuke, let it 
be understood that these are used as necessary adjuncts of the argu- 
ment submitted, not as vindictive in intention. If anything further 
were needed, I should say that I had fairly earned the right to thei 
use by sitting under Mr. Ingersoll's preaching for two mortal hours, 
the object, as a clergyman, of his multiplied slurs and his uncurbed 
ridicule. 

Cacodoxy. 

Mr. Ingersoll's subject is "Orthodoxy." For clearness, discrimi- 
nate between orthodoxy, heterodoxy and cacodoxy. Orthodoxy is, 
first, "right doctrine;" then, that which is agreed upon by some 
standard authority to be right doctrine. Heterodoxy is " different 
doctrine" — that which varies from this standard. Cacodoxy is 
"bad doctrine." The issue in this controversy is not between 
orthodoxy and heterodoxy, but between orthodoxy and heterodoxy 
on the one hand, and cacodoxy on the other. Do not confuse infi- 
delity with heterodoxy; it is cacodoxy, bad doctrine, always and 
everywhere. If Mr. Ingersoll is right, then not only is orthodoxy, 
technically speaking, wrong, but Christian and Jew, Protestant and 
Catholic, Unitarian and Universalist, and Evangelical Christian — 
all are wrong, mistaken, and, for the most part, fools. 

This defines the issue, and shows us where the man stands whom 
we are to consider. For other purposes we need not confine our- 
selves to any careful restriction of the term "Orthodoxy," since it 
is evident that what Mr. Ingersoll is aiming his attacks against is 
Christianity. It is this that he announces his purpose to do what 
he can while he lives to destroy. When a man devotes himself to a 
chosen mission, with that his very name becomes afterwards associ- 
ated. Speak the name of Wendell Phillips and you think at once 
of shackles falling from human limbs and slaves set free; pronounce 
the name of John B. Gough, and there lies before you the demon 
Rum, dethroned, and the glass of cold water sparkling in true 



7 



beauty and honor; utter the name of Robert G. Ingersoll, and you 
have before you a man whose talents might enable him to accom- 
plish vast good, hissing the hot venom of his impotent hate at the 
grandest system of faith the world ever saw. 

Is Orthodoxy Dying ? 

Mr. Ingersoll takes great pleasure in opening his lecture with the 
announcement that " Orthodox religion is dying out of the civilized 
world." The statement is so old that it is stale, and so utterly at 
variance with palpable facts that it is positively absurd. Celsus, 
Porphyry and Julian successively made this claim. Under the reign 
of Domitian, at the opening of the fourth century, and after the 
last of the fierce ten persecutions, the extirpation of Christianity 
was commemorated b^ a coin which was struck, upon which was 
stamped the figure of Jupiter hurling a thunderbolt at a prostrate 
form representing Christianity. 

Voltaire said: " I am weary of hearing them repeat that twelve 
men were enough to establish Christianity, and I long to prove 
to them that it needs but one to destroy it." 

Thomas Paine said: "I have gone through the Bible as a man 
would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder and fell trees; 
here they lie, and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They 
may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never grow." 

James Parton, in his life of Aaron Burr, speaking of the infi- 
delity which prevailed in the early years of this century, says: " It 
was confidently predicted that Christianity could not survive two 
more generations." 

Mr. Ingersoll, however, is more modest than his predecessors; he 
is so good as to declare that the patient is dying of decrepitude — 
softening of the brain and ossification of the heart. But notwith- 
standing his diagnosis affirms that Christianity is in a moribund con- 
dition, he is none the less assiduous in administering the poison of 
his infidelity. And no wonder, for if Christianity has been "dying" 



8 



for eighteen centuries there is great need that those who wish to 
help along its death shall do their utmost. 

In proof of the absurdity of this statement that Christianity is 
passing away, I might deluge you with statistics, with stubborn facts 
that reassure the faith of the desponding Christian, and perplex and 
annoy the infidel whose wish fathers the thought of the extinction 
of Christianity. These facts are accessible, however, and I spare 
you their repetition. In their stead, here are three reasons which 
lead me to believe that Christianity is not dying, and will not die: 

First of all, Mr. Ingersoll is lecturing against the Christian faith; 
this augurs well for its continued acceptance. To some extent, I 
am sorry to say, he succeeds in disseminating infidelity; but to a 
much larger degree his attacks awaken sympathy for, and deeper 
belief in the Bible. Pouring shot into a solid fortification only 
serves to strengthen it. Christianity needs eter new adjustments 
and adaptations in view of the advancing thought of the age, but 
not on account of its advancing scum and froth and drivel. And 
while these roaming lecturers are traveling about delivering their 
virulent phillipics, the preachers go on preaching, and the men hold 
to a sturdy faith, and the women pray, and the children sing; and it 
vexes to distraction the disciples of unbelief. For you must remem- 
ber that an honest infidel is always trying to convince himself of the 
correctness of his theory of things; and how to account for this per- 
sistence of faith on the ground of the tenacious hold and inherent 
vitality of superstition, this is a wearisome problem. 

In the next place, whatever success infidelity meets with is always 
temporary. Doubt is most likely to attack young men; but they 
get over it just as children recover from the measles. Rob the 
human soul of faith, that glorious robe that shields it in life's wither- 
ing heat, and protects it in its chilling cold, and like an injured 
child it will clothe itself again in the new forms of an undying 
belief. It is to be regretted that so often the human mind, dis- 
mayed at the engulfing storms of unbelief which threaten it, should 
drop back into the unchanged harbor of traditional belief; better 



9 



that it should return from its daring, but necessary voyages of 
speculation, laden with new and richer truth, yet seeking anchorage 
on the shore-line of old and familiar verities. But the fact remains 
that men return from doubt to faith, and they are led to do this by 
the workings of one of the deepest laws of their being. Mr. Inger- 
soll whispers to half of his audience that Protestantism dies hard, 
then to the other half that Catholicism dies hard, and then to all 
that infidelity is not dying, but it is growing and increasing every 
day. And now let me say out loud, for it does not need to be con- 
cealed in a whisper, that infidelity dies hard, very hard; therefore it 
protrudes its ugly head under the blazing light of this nineteenth 
century and piteously begs for one more chance. The eighteenth 
century generously gave it its golden opportunity for establishing 
itself respectably in the world, with the drift of social and political 
influences all in its favor. But it ignominiously fell — among the 
learned, crushed under the trip-hammer of Butler's Analogy, among 
the masses swept into inglorious retreat before the mighty march of 
Methodism. All the writings of the English Deistical writers of the 
last century have been consigned to the limbo of oblivion, save those 
of Hume and Gibbon, the historians, and, historically, the grudge that 
every infidel holds against a Methodist preacher is easily under- 
stood. I doubt if the nineteenth century could give infidelity a 
chance equal to that which the last century afforded it, but I am 
very sure that it has neither the wish nor the intention so to do. In 
sluggish ages, as a pastime the world may good-naturedly consent 
to witness the attempted tearing down of its institutions, to see 
whether the foundations are there; but in such a throbbing, driving, 
practical era as the present, the extreme iconoclasts are doomed to 
get the cold shoulder. 

The third fact that indicates the permanence of Christianity is 
that orthodoxy is progressive. Nothing disconcerts the infidel so 
much as this undeniable fact. His favorite occupation is to set up 
a fossilized, mediaeval orthodoxy, then to bedaub himself with his infi- 
del war-paint, and dance about in fancied triumph. In the pages of 



infidel writers, and those of defunct theologians, alike, you will look 
in vain for the orthodoxy of to-day. A short time ago at Princeton 
they discussed " Progress in Theology." The discussion was origi- 
nated and conducted altogether by conservative thinkers; not one 
of them bore the slightest taint of heresy, and the drift of opinion 
was altogether in favor of progress. But one of "the Lord's silly 
people " was there, as everywhere, and he in his timorous faith 
became alarmed and shouted " Wolf ! " Then he asserted- that 
" Princeton theology hadn't had a new idea for a century." And 
afar off in the infidel camp they set up a shout of glee. The fool- 
ish follower within the camp joins hands with the hostile foe with- 
out, to keep up the warfare over by-gone issues, in fortifications long 
since relinquished. 

The progressiveness of the orthodoxy of the present, as compared 
with the orthodoxy of the past, is seen in its theology, which is of a 
Biblical type, not metaphysical, as heretofore; in its Bible, where the 
recognition of the divine and human elements has superseded the 
old mechanical view of inspiration; in its personal and historical 
Christ, no longer hidden in sepulchral dogmatism; in its widely- 
tolerant church, freeing itself from the distracting and crippling 
influence of sectarianism; and in its spiritual heaven and hell, 
relieved forever of gross material conceptions. I do not hope to 
convince Mr. Ingersoll that orthodoxy is progressive, because I can 
not remove the scales which interest and prejudice have placed over 
his eyes; but in the further progress of the conflict between faith 
and disbelief, this will become apparent in the greater readiness 
with which Christianity may be defended, the fewer reasons that 
can be urged for rejecting it, and the speedier overthrow of tem- 
porary skepticism. 

Must the Preacher Go? 

Here notice Mr. Ingersoll 's dictum that the preacher must go. 
He starts his procession in motion to show that this is inevitable. 
The astrologer gives way to the astronomer, the alchemist to the 



1 1 

chemist, the prophet to the philosopher, the stage-coach to the loco- 
motive; therefore, the preacher must go and the teacher take his 
place, quod erat demonstrandum. But now, before the preacher packs 
up to leave — since we are assured that everything shall be done 
fairly — let us ask, what has become of the doctor? He had him up 
before us with his rusty lancet and his bottle of jalap, and he made 
him the butt of his ridicule, but he failed to say whether he had 
also joined the grand cavalcade. Then he let off his own profes- 
sion of the law without telling us whether they are affected at all by 
this enforced tramp. The omission was quite lawyer-like, it must 
be admitted. Permit me to supply the missing links in ■ Mr. Inger- 
soll's logic, that is to say, in this, particular instance; I should not 
care to undertake the heavy contract of doing this service for the 
rest of this lengthy lecture. What has become of the doctor? — this 
is the question. Well, here he is, large as life, and an indispensable 
part of our civilization. Does he use the lancet? Yes, with that he 
relieves pleurisy, and with that as an only resort, in certain cases of 
apoplexy, he saves life. Does he administer that old remedy — 
jalap? Yes, in certain stages of dropsy nothing will answer as well. 
But because, for the most part, jalap has given way to aloes and 
colocynth, while bleeding has been superseded by purging and 
sedatives, we do not dream of leaping to the lame and impotent 
conclusion that the doctor must go. 

So with the lawyer; much of his lore is now popularized; it is laid 
down in text-books; but we do not think that the services of the 
teacher will displace those of the lawyer. And now let me say, that 
the same logic which dismisses the preacher and substitutes the 
teacher, dispenses, also, with the doctor, sending everybody to swal- 
low down such nostrums and decoctions as may be supplied by the 
druggist, and waves away the professional lawyer^ leaving every- 
body at the mercy of those pettifoggers and shysters who will swarm 
in to take the vacant place. The modern pulpit finds a sphere of 
action and influence greatly different from that which was filled by 
the preacher of the olden time; but in this it comes under, simply, 



12 



that general tendency which prevails now, to divide up and special- 
ize the work of the world. And much as the Freethinkers may dis- 
like it, we must conclude that the world is not ready as yet to dis- 
pense with the preaching of the Gospel. 

As to his ignorant demand that the pulpit shall speak out just 
what it thinks and all that it thinks, it is of one piece with the whole 
of Mr. IngersoH's" performance. He is himself a sample of a man 
who speaks just what he thinks. I do not deny his honesty; he is 
probably much more honest than most men can be after they have 
struck a fatal blow at the foundations of all honesty and virtue, viz.: 
a belief in God; but what I object to is his brain, with its defective 
working, and his ideas which are utterly ill-digested. He goes 
about the country speaking just what he thinks, and he blabs out 
doubts which other men have sense enough to keep to themselves. 
Doubt is serviceable when it helps along to a better faith; not when 
it lacerates the soul with tormenting uncertainty as to the funda- 
mentals of belief. I would have the pulpit absolutely free for the 
utterance of truth that ought to be spoken, but for my part I am 
glad that the preachers have too much sense to tell everything they 
may chance to think. That will do for a gang of ruffians round a 
fire in Texas, or for a bold and reckless infidel lecturer, but not for 
those who are to feed the world's faith, and help men forward to a 
better life. 

Unproved Verities. 

Here notice another of Mr. Ingersoll's brilliant dictums, that 
" Everything except the demonstrated truth is liable to die." 
If we reject everything but that which has been positively 
proved, where will it land us ? Mr. Ingersoll undoubtedly accepts 
the atomic theory of matter; did he or any one else ever see 
one of these molecules of which matter is composed ? Never. 
The smallest grain of sand upon the sea-shore, or the most 
minute particle that floats in a sunbeam, is a mountain to the 
infinitesimal atom which enters into the organic structure of 



13 



matter and explains its phenomena. There is the hypothetical 
medium called ether, which is assumed to pervade all space, 
whether occupied by solid, liquid, or gaseous substances, and by 
its vibrations or undulations transmitting light and heat. No one 
ever pretended to see it, and no one can prove its existence, yet we 
believe in it, nevertheless. When sound vibrations are more rapid 
than thirty-eight thousand strokes per second they become inaudible 
to most human ears; but they tell us that insects are capable of 
apprehending still more rapid vibrations, and they become to them 
a means of inter-communication. We believe that, but it is not 
proved. From the automatic movements of plants, as seen in the 
case of the wonderful Venus' Fly-Trap, and where tendrils reach out, 
and sweep around, and select a support, it is argued that vegetables 
have what looks like consciousness, viz.: the power of making move- 
ments with reference to ends. This seems incredible, yet we accept 
it. Mr. Ingersoll believes in the doctrine of evolution (or, as it is 
more properly called, epigenesis); so do I, only his view of evolu- 
tion, materialistic and atheistic, is the distance of the heavens apart 
from my view, which is theistic a'nd Christian. But now let it be 
understood that the doctrine of evolution is a doctrine, not proved, 
but as a working hypothesis rapidly gaining acceptance. Shall we 
believe a theory, unproved and unprovable ? Yes, by all means, for 
the evidence is so overwhelming that it impels us to believe. But if 
Mr. Ingersoll's dictum were to be accepted, that nothing is to be re- 
ceived until proven, then all our science would be at a stand-still. 
Literature, too, and history would be paralyzed, and in practical life 
you couldn't trust a single bank to handle your money, or sell goods 
on credit, or make any of those numerous ventures in which you 
reckon on an uncertain future. This is one of the idlest and 
emptiest of the dogmas of infidelity, that things not proven are un- 
worthy of credence. What we know by belief forms as necessary 
and as legitimate a part of our knowledge as that which we know 
by demonstration. 



14 



One thing further before we proceed. Let it be understood that 
I do not defend a bigoted, or perverted, or corrupt Christianity. 
Occasionally Mr. Ingersoll administers a fair and square blow upon 
some vulnerable forms in which the Christian system is held; though, 
for the most part, he is doing just what Carlyle said Voltaire was 
doing — "swinging his battering-rams in the wrong direction." 
When, however, I see him attacking that which is really false or 
wrong, I feel like saluting him with the challenge, " Lay on, Mac- 
duff," with no abatement from the further emphasis of that familiar 
quotation. Still, his narrow-mindedness and bigotry impair his use- 
fulness, even here, so that the only good he can accomplish is in the 
way of such secondary benefit as accompanies a pestilential scourge. 

Mohammedanism. 

Now, let us examine some of the arguments which Mr. Ingersoll 
draws from history. I will warn you at the outset, however, that he 
blunders just as atrociously when he dabbles in history as when he 
dabbles in theology. Prescott, the historian^ threw aside the work 
of Strauss on the Life of Christ after reading a few pages, because 
its method was so unfair that it was offensive to the mind of a 
trained historical writer. Mr. Ingersoll travels along a plane of 
thought far inferior to that which Strauss was capable of pursuing, 
but he has all that able writer's partial and equivocal methods. 
Ingersoll's book of history is bound in flexible binding and silk- 
sewed, so that he can turn and twist it at the bent of his own sweet 
will. 

He enumerates some of the blows the Church received. He finds 
it convenient to say nothing about the first series of shocks she 
suffered in the famous and horrible ten persecutions, beginning with 
Nero, and continuing on, at intervals, under the different emperors, 
until the time of Constantine. This shows up an ugly side of that 
Paganism which he is fond of exalting at the expense of Chris- 
tianity, and the sterling worth and evident truth of the faith which 



15 



survived in that fearful ordeal when " the blood of the martyrs was 
the seed of the church." This blow is wisely passed over in silence. 

Mohammedanism, he says, came in conflict with Christianity, 
the crescent was triumphant over the cross, God did not come as 
expected to the rescue, and this sowed the seed of distrust. Now, 
do not be in haste to relinquish the belief that Divine Providence 
directs the issues of war. Foolishly and rashly Mr. Ingersoll says 
^ that the failure of the Crusades decided the supremacy of Moham- 
i medanism. What about the battle of Tours when Mohammedanism 
was young and fresh, and the Saracen hordes, flushed with victory, 
overran the Pyrenees into France, and were overwhelmingly de- 
I feated by the armies of Christendom under Charles Martel. That 
was one of the great decisive battles of the world. Then Moham- 
medanism was hurled back to its accursed despotism among the 
ignorant and stagnant populations of the East, while Christianity 
went on the westward course with the star of empire, building itself 
firmly on the virgin soil of Gaul and Britain and Scandinavia and 
Germany, and thus preparing for its world-wide career. The failure 
of the Crusades was a blow to chivalry, to the papal authority 
envious of the rival power of the feudal nobility — but not to Chris- 
tianity; and in the end they proved an inestimable blessing to the 
world in breaking up the feudal system, compacting the populations 
of Europe for the moulding influence of modern civilization, and 
paving the way for the establishment of commerce and popular 
liberty. On the whole, I rather think that God had hold of the 
helm all through this period. 

Art. 

The next slander perpetrated by Mr. Ingersoll is, that Christianity 
laid its ignorant hands upon the paintings and statues and other 
works of art of the Old World, and destroyed them, and that this 
brought on the night of the Middle Ages. And when he lays his 
ignorant hands upon the records of history, and deliberately falsifies 



1 6 



them after this fashion, I marvel that even over the brazen face of an 
Infidel there does not visibly creep the crimson blush of shame. The 
decay, dissolution and death of the rotten and effete civilizations 
of the Old World, this and this alone occasioned the Dark Ages. In 
the putrid soil of paganism the pure germ of Christianity was 
planted. Because divinely originated and protected, it grew through 
three centuries of destructive persecution. Stifled under the nox- 
ious atmosphere and corrupting splendors of lingering heathenism, 
its fresh young life was well nigh destroyed; yet, surviving, it sprang 
from the dormant centuries, the most potent factor in our modern 
civilization. Christianity hostile to, or destructive of art? Absurd- 
ity most superlative. The greatest blow to the stored-up learning 
of the ancient world was the destruction of the Alexandrian library; 
this was done by Julius Caesar just before the coming of Christ. 
The next greatest blow was the destruction of Rome by Nero; 
Ingersoll clasps hands with this bloodiest monster of all time, and 
says: " Yes, the Christians did it." When the despised religion of 
Christ was establishing itself in the world, they were decapitating 
the statues of the days of Phidias, to crown them with the heads of 
the emperors Gaius and Claudius. Nero himself sought to improve 
the Alexander of Lysimachus by gilding it. What about the Cata- 
combs, covered with rubbish and forgotton all through the Middle 
Ages, yet bringing to the light the records of early Christian art, 
just as the excavations at Pompeii reveal to us the extinct civiliza- 
tion of Rome? Christianity plucked up by the roots the fearfully 
depraved and immoral taint with which pagan art was infected, but 
in lieu thereof it furnished pure and noble themes in the portrayal of 
which the genius of the great masters flashed into life. And when 
I think of the immortal productions which Christianity nursed into 
being— the Madonnas, the Ecce Homos, the Mater Dolorosas, 
Leonardo's " The Last Supper," Raphael's " The Transfiguration," 
and Michael Angelo's " The Last Judgment " — I feel all the more 
vividly how utterly senseless and wicked is this charge that Chris- 
tianity is inimical to art. 



17 



Civilization. 

Here let me say a word concerning the relation of the Bible 
to civilization. Mr. Ingersoll thinks that we mistake the inci- 
dent for the cause. I am glad to see that he is able to con- 
cede (for I suppose he does not do this unwittingly) the 
incidental value of the Bible in helping forward the work of the 
civilization of mankind. Now, nobody supposes that God had for- 
gotten or was ignoring the Roman people, or any other of the 
nations of antiquity. They all along had the law written on their 
hearts, and were, therefore, a law unto themselves. They were all 
working away on these problems of life, all contributed something 
of permanent good and all made salutary failures. And looking 
back over the arena of history — "A mighty maze, yet not without a 
plan " — we see how Greece excelled in developing philosophy and 
culture, and Rome in perfecting the science of government and law, 
but both produced a polytheistic religion, corroded by superstition, 
and therefore a civilization that fell into early and utter decay. 
The Jews alone successfully worked out the problem of religion, 
but they failed in adapting it to all mankind. Then Christianity 
was given to the world, and supplied the element of moral order, 
through which the materials of the old civilizations, under the 
potent influence of modern science — "the handmaid of religion " — 
were to be moulded into the stable civilization of the present day. 
When we say that the Bible is the foundation of popular liberty, and 
the bulwark of defense in maintaining the rights of man, we make 
no narrow, empty claim. It is a deep conviction, resulting from 
ages of experience, and confirmed by every respectable and un- 
biased historian. 

Here let us dismiss, with few words, the unreasonable cavil that 
Christianity has been the cause of war. What is this but confound- 
ing the incident with the cause. That violence and bloodshed have 
been incidental accompaniments of the religion of Christ we must 



i8 

mournfully confess. As Lacon tersely says, " Men will wrangle over 
religion, fight for it, die for it, anything but live it." But that is 
only saying that that same bad human nature which kept the gates 
of the temple of Janus open, except during four brief periods, still 
lingers in men's hearts. Human government, the family, love, upon 
which Mr. Ingersoll is forever bestowing his fulsome and unheeded 
eulogiums — all these, men have made a constant bone of contention, 
yet we do not advocate their abolishment on that account. In cases 
where religious hatred or bigotry has disgraced Christianity with 
"wars and fightings," the proper appeal has ever been from a per- 
verted to a true and pure Christianity — never to a wrangling 
infidelity. 

The Science of the Past. 

Turn now, to look at some of Mr. Ingersoll's disquisitions on 
science. And here, again, I warn you of his utter unreliableness, 
notwithstanding the fact that he struts about in the familiar 
accoutrements of the veritable sciolist that he is. The discovery of 
America, and the establishment of the Copernican system, according 
to him, was the next thing that tended to upset Christianity. A few 
facts just here ought to be clearly understood. The ideas of the 
ancients concerning the universe are preserved for us in the works 
of Ptolemy, the Egyptian astronomer, who flourished in the second 
century of our era at Alexandria. According to his system the 
earth is at the center, the planets and the sun revolve around it, 
then come the fabled crystalline spheres, and outside of all the 
empyrean, or abode of the blessed. The change from the geocen- 
tric to the heliocentric theory of the universe was a mighty revo- 
lution in the notions of rnankind, accomplished through the painful 
and protracted thought of centuries, and which staggered and per- 
plexed science, philosophy and civilization, as well as religion. 
Who first thought of the sun as the center of the universe ? Pytha- 
goras, five hundred years, mark you, before Christ. Who developed 



1 9 



this idea ? Among others, Niccolo da Cusa, Domenica Maria 
Novara, Celio Calcagnini and Copernicus. But the existence of 
the antipodes was argued in a sermon two hundred years before 
Copernicus came to years of manhood, by the preacher Giordano 
da Rivalta. Science was resisting the progress of discovery. 
Hallam says that the whole weight of Aristotle's name was thrown 
into the scale against Copernicus. And Tycho Brahe, the cele- 
brated Danish astronomer, who was born three years after Coperni- 
cus died, rejected the Copernican system, conceding only that the 
planets revolved around the sun, while in his scheme the sun and 
moon are still revolving round the earth. Through the researches 
of Galileo, Kepler, and, finally, Sir Isaac Newton, the Copernican 
system was at last established, and everything revolved round the 
sun, until our later science, when we begin to believe that there is 
still another centre round which the sun revolves. Now the point 
of all this is easily stated. The persecutions which this progress of 
scientific discovery aroused are indefensible from the vantage- 
ground of our present enlightenment, but especially from that of our 
better understanding of the principles of the Bible; but as things 
then were, it is hard to see how this deplorable policy could have 
been avoided. Society has an inherent right to oppose innovations, 
in order to test what is true and sift out what is false. This right 
was exceeded by an ignorant political despotism which had arrayed 
itself in forms of Christianity, and there *the blame rests, not with 
the religion of Christ itself. Galileo unfortunately and unwisely 
turned aside from the pursuit of science to attack the particular 
interpretation of the Scriptures then advocated by the Church, 
and his persecution was an atrocious wrong. But as showing that 
wiser counsels strove to assert themselves, there is the noble and 
memorable answer of Cardinal Baronius to Galileo: "The Bible 
was given to teach us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens 
go." That is precisely the position of the orthodoxy of to-day, 
which must not be held responsible for the errors of the past. 



20 



The Science of To-day. 

This rapid survey of the change which science has wrought in the 
past will prepare us for a sober estimate of the change which it is 
more readily effecting in our own day. Just as great a revolution 
from the idea of a geocentric to that of a heliocentric, cosmogony, is 
the revolution now in progress, from the conception of the produc- 
tion of matter and life by creative fiat, to that of their origination 
through the agency of a law of development. If through that first 
revolution, as we maintain, Christianity and the Bible passed un- 
harmed, so we may naturally expect will it be in the change now 
going on, in spite of the foolish fears of timid believers, and the pre- 
mature fireworks of an ignorant infidelity. 

I will not waste any time over the school-boy braggadocios and 
the rhetorical pyrotechnics with which Mr. Ingersoll apostrophizes 
the name of Charles Darwin. The man whose remains have been 
given honored sepulture in Westminster Abbey, is held in affection- 
ate esteem throughout Christendom; and Mr. Ingersoll's laudations 
add no more to his greatness than the noisy buzzing of a bumble- 
bee. But why does Ingersoll say nothing of Lamarck, the French 
scientist, who propounded the law of evolution in 1809, fifty years 
before Darwin? Why nothing of the "Vestiges of Creation," 
written by Dr. Robert Chambers fifteen years before Darwin's 
" Origin of Species " appeared, and anticipating the whole of the 
development theory ? Why nothing of Alfred R. Wallace, who 
separately from and simultaneously with Darwin, propounded his 
famous theory? Why also does he omit to say that there is just 
as much dispute and divergence among scientific men as to the form 
and details of this doctrine of evolution, as there is among theolo- 
gians concerning the doctrine of the Atonement ? He says religion 
and science are enemies; but the best thinkers to-day confidently 
assert that there is no real enmity between the two. He says that 
evolution is inconsistent with Christianity; but Prof. Asa Gray and 



21 



Prof. LeConte and Principal Dawson are of a contrary opinion. As 
to the past and present effects of science, our lecturer resorts to a 
discreditable makeshift. Science, he says, passed its hand above 
the earth and beneath it, and where was the old heaven and hell ? 
Vanished forever. And so they were — that is, the pagan heaven 
and hell. The one was just above Mount Olympus, and entered by 
the gate of clouds; the other, was down a cave in the volcanic 
regions of Vesuvius; these were wiped out, sure enough. But he 
says, we found there was no place there for Jacob's ladder to lean 
against. How much room was needed for a ladder which was 
erected in a dream ? " No place for the gods and angels " — no, not 
for the gods of Olympus, or their angels. ' No place to hold the 
waters of the deluge"— but I rather think the ocean held a good 
part of this supply, for we ar.e told that the fountains of the great 
deep were broken up. " No place to which Christ could have 
ascended " — but if the ascension meant simply the completion of 
the process of resurrection, and the passing of the physical body of 
Christ into the glorified body of eternity, what space or place would 
be needed in a condition and world where distinctions of space no 
longer exist ? " No place for the towers and domes of the new 
Jerusalem " — but how much space is required for towers and domes 
which exist in the meaning, and for the purposes of a metaphor ? 
The grand defeat of Christianity pictured by Mr. Ingersoll inglori- 
ously fails to materialize. The Freethinkers, by persistently defying 
the armies of Israel, succeeded in calling forth a self-appointed 
champion of Christianity, who defended the Bible at their conven- 
tion held last summer at Rochester. He insisted on wearing the 
heavy armor of the mediaeval theology, and staked the truth of 
Scripture upon the falsity of the doctrine of evolution. This filled 
the infidels with glee. They set up their stridulous war-whoop and 
proceeded to take this clergyman's scalp. But they carefully kept 
out of sight the fact that the defense then made was repudiated by 
the best thought of Christendom. Paganism was shattered by the 
science of the past, Christianity sprung into new life; medievalism 



22 



falls before the science of to-day, but Christianity is perpetuated 
and marches forward in civilizing and saving mankind. Mr. 
Ingersoll sheds his crocodile tears of pity over the poor ministers, 
who he says are twisting the Scriptures to fit the demonstrations of 
science. But if he will postpone his sniffling a little he may discover 
that the ministers have more sense than he gives them credit far. 
They understand that it is just as legitimate for theology to change 
its interpretations of the Bible, as it is for the scientists to change 
their interpretations of nature. And they also understand that the 
Bible does not teach science, and does not profess to. Science 
blundered badly over " Bathybius," and she is now just as visionary 
in groping after "the missing link " and the origin of life, as the 
old alchemists were in hunting for the principle of transmutation. 
The most thoughtful scientists say to the theologians, "There is no 
real conflict between us, but we would advise you to drive a little 
slow, because we confess that in many directions we are considerably 
at sea ourselves." 

Changing Creeds. 

We now come to Mr. Ingersoll's discussion of creeds, in general, 
and the new Congregational creed in particular. In this line of 
thought his ignorance is most dense; but in he plunges with the 
utmost sang-froid, and with all the assurance of a trained theologian. 
First he criticises the retaining of creeds which are not believed in 
their entirety. " Stick to your creed or change it " — this is his 
challenge. How does this apply in the domain of medicine, where 
it is conceded that there is much more conservatism, and I may 
say, bigotry, than in theology ? Must the physician renounce his 
allegiance to the old school, simply because he is learning something 
from new practitioners ? Must he upset his whole system of 
medical doctrine, because he is beginning to discard some of its 
tenets ? Bear in mind that the conservative instinct which leads 
men to resist hasty advance, to weigh and test new discoveries, and 
to change slowly established doctrines, is one of the invaluable and 



indispensable safeguards of human society. How does this chal- 
lenge bear upon Mr. Ingersoll's own profession of the law. In 
New York state a movement has been in progress for some time 
to codify the laws, that is to gather together the scattered principles 
of law, select, eliminate and condense them into a code, by which 
the administration of justice may be facilitated and simplified and 
rendered more effective. Yet, against that movement a large pro- 
portion of the legal fraternity stand arrayed; and it is not simply 
professional interest, but legitimate conservatism, that is the explana- 
tion of this. So with theological creeds; they represent the actual 
faith of the past, but the substantial faith of the present. The 
Westminster Confession forbids the marriage of a deceased wife's 
sister, identifies the Pope with the Man of Sin, compresses the work 
of creation into the space of six literal days; these positions are 
widely and prevailingly rejected in the Presbyterian Church, yet the 
creed stands. That creed is subject to and actually undergoing 
revision in sermons preached from our pulpits, theological lectures 
delivered in our seminaries, and discussions held from time to time 
in our ecclesiastical assemblies ; yet these changes can be incorpo- 
rated in creed expression only after the proper lapse of time. Noth- 
ing is truer concerning this whole question of the changing of creeds, 
than what was said by Dr. Herrick of Boston, in his sermon before 
the Congregational Council which authorized the framing of this very 
creed that Mr. Ingersoll so unintelligently discusses: "Creeds are 
not to be manufactured. They grow as the worlds are grown, by 
great secular development. They change their forms imperceptibly 
to the eye of the contemporary beholder. They emanate from the 
closets, from the pages of ^ear-stained Bibles, from the chambers of 
solitary suffering, from the midnight Bethels, where uncrowned 
princes prevail with the Angel of the Covenant. They come from 
those serene and silent hights where long-trained and long-watching 
eyes have at last beheld the nebulous hint revealing itself in stellar 
distinctness and beauty. Not infrequently they are precipitated in 
the fires of persecution. No true creed was ever made." 



24 



" Stick to your creed or change it; " this is Mr. Ingersoll's shallow 
demand. It loses needed force when we remember that he cares 
not a fig whether creeds exist, even. To that, I submit the counter- 
challenge, that when he takes up a specified creed for discussion he 
shall stick to that and not change it. In discussing this creed's 
representation of God, he quotes, that he may make himself merry 
over it, the declaration that God is " without body, parts or 
passions." In his authorized report of his lecture, it is true, he 
says, this is from the Episcopalian creed. But in his lecture as he 
delivers it, he says — for I heard him — "The next thing I find in 
this creed is, that God is without body, parts or passions," which 
declaration this creed does not contain. In other words, to use the 
plain Anglo-Saxon, Mr. Ingersoll is here guilty of a deliberate lie. 
But now a word concerning this statement, which he foolishly at- 
tempts to ridicule. It does occur (as he prints for his protection, but 
hasn't the honor to say) in the first of the Thirty-nine Articles of the 
Episcopal Church, but in its full and unabbreviated form it is found 
in the second chapter of the Westminster Confession — in a passage 
which surpasses in grandeur anything, perhaps, of the kind in any 
of the ancient creeds. Do you remember the origin of that defini- 
tion of God ? Long those devout men sought for language adequate 
to express their thought of God. Then it was proposed that they 
seek guidance in prayer. The youngest of their number being 
called upon, led in prayer, and poured forth such an inspired address 
to the Deity, that the Assembly, on rising from their knees, at once 
agreed that this was all-sufficient. In its condensed form, here it is: 
" God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in his being, 
wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth." If we make an 
honest confession, let us say that the definition of God furnished by 
the Westminster divines, is a gem of pure splendor. But they in- 
cluded the statement that " God was without body, parts or passions." 
How so — is Mr. Ingersoll's imbecile objection — how is he without 
passions, if he so loved the world as to give his Son, and if his 
anger burns against sin ? Imbecile, I say, in the implication that 



^5 



those tireless students of the Divine Word would stupidly contra- 
dict its plainest statements. Think of the pantheistic notion, then 
prevalent, not yet by any means dead, that the world is part of God, 
sustaining to him the relation of body to soul; think of the invet- 
erate tendency of men toward anthropomorphism, and the habit of 
taking literally the figurative references to the Divine attributes, as. 
corresponding to the passions and characteristics of men; and then 
give the old Westminster theologians credit for sanity, at least. 

Creation. 

Mr. Ingersoll cavils at the fundamental doctrine that God created 
the universe. Over this dispute let us waste as little space as possi- 
ble. He raises the old question (and well may he call it old; the 
most of men think that we have got along so far in the world's 
history that we need not continue to vex ourselves with the problems 
that worried Plato and Aristotle solely because of the obscurity of 
the knowledge of that time) — the old question, How did God make 
everything out of nothing ? and, again, Who made God ? In one 
sentence I answer, that the First Great Cause of all needs not a 
cause himself, and is inherently equal to the production of the 
universe from nothing. Given a God, and the difficulties in the 
thought of creation from nothing, though unexplained, cease to 
perplex us. I will not superfluously enumerate the overwhelming 
proofs which have produced the predominant and ineradicable 
belief in the existence of God, as an almost axiomatic postulate; 
but I will simply say that Herschel, the eminent astronomer, said, 
that the universe bore to him all the marks of a " manufactured 
article." Mr. Ingersoll, however, thinks that it existed from all 
eternity. (It is not necessary to cite others who coincide with him, 
because he is very emphatic in reminding us that what he propounds 
is "according to my notion.") John Stuart Mill says, "In the 
present state of our knowledge the adaptations in nature afford a 
large balance of probability in favor of creation by intelligence." 



26 



But Mr. Ingersoll asserts that an eternal universe is the greater 
probability. Herbert Spencer says, that "amid the mysteries, which 
become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there 
will remain the one absolute certainty that we are ever in the 
presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things 
proceed." But Ingersoll suspends the existence of the Infinite God 
upon the slender thread of a dubious "perhaps." Pay your tribute 
at the shrine of a cheerless agnosticism, or of an inspiring theism, 
and thus take your choice. But keep in mind the frightful conse- 
quences of this doubt of the Divine existence, as depicted by 
Richter, who says, " In all this wide universe there is none so 
utterly solitary and alone as a denier of God. With orphaned heart 
— a heart which has lost the Great Father — he mourns beside the 
immeasurable corpse of Nature, a corpse no longer animated or 
held together by the Great Spirit of the universe — a corpse which 
grows in its grave; and by this corpse he mourns until he himself 
crumbles and falls away from it into nothingness." 

Here let me beg you not to mistake Ingersoll's oft-repeated decla- 
ration, that there may be a God, but he doesn't know whether there 
is or not, for the innocent expression of humility as to the scope of 
his knowledge; for as in the case of every Agnostic, the cruel and 
relentless dogma lies here concealed, that the human mind is not 
capable of knowing God, and the direct implication is, that you are 
a fool if you think otherwise. By all means be on your guard against 
the bigotry and superstition of religion; but exercise ten times this 
vigilance as to the more frightful Charybdis of the bigotry and 
superstition of a withering unbelief. 

Providence. 

As weighing against the belief in Divine Providence overruling 
and governing the world, Mr. Ingersoll cites Siberia with its tears 
and its groans, Java with its earthquakes, and the Orient generally 
with its pestilences and plagues. But extend the list of enumerated 



2 7 



evils as far as you may, and yet the difficulty and the mystery which 
they suggest really inheres in nature and the universe itself, and not 
in religion. We do not pretend to be able to satisfactorily reconcile 
them with the Divine goodness, but we believe they shall be seen to 
be not inconsistent therewith in the better light of the eternal 
world. Here let us confess, too, that faith often staggers; as in the 
case of Dr. Edward Beecher, who, when writing his " Conflict of 
Ages," sprang up from his desk with the agonized cry, "What if 
God is not good ? " He had encountered one of those " Moments'of 
terrible doubt when the soul is so borne away on the surge of the 
skeptical wave that rises from the depths of all human speculation, 
that it can only cling to the Divine by an effort of will and with 
something of the gamester's thought that this is the winning side." 
When we say that God " permits " evil we refer to its relation to the 
Divine plan. " If God made a man whom he knew would commit 
murder, then God is guilty of that murder." Shallow cavil: the 
man acts freely in committing the murder, and he alone is responsi- 
ble for it. God's object in giving him life contemplated all the 
good and all the evil he would do. Suppose, for instance, that his 
act of murder rouses a sluggish community to enact a law that 
murder shall be punishable with death, does not a good purpose 
become manifest ? But let us not do more than skirt this unfathom- 
able subject of the relations existing between the plans of God 
and the acts of man. 

But Mr. Ingersoll thinks that statistics have obliterated the 
foundations of a belief in Divine Providence. Then he parcels out 
some of the results of the theorizing of Buckle, who is not so much 
read now as formerly. Statistics give us an approximate idea of 
probable occurrences without any distinction as to individuals; 
Divine Providence alone protects us in the workings of law from 
any impairing of the dignity or value of the individual life. He 
thinks it is supreme selfishness and egotism for a man who escaped 
from shipwreck when all the rest were lost, to attribute that to special 
providence. That depends upon the use which is made of the 



2 8 



doctrine, which is, it is true, capable of being over-strained or mis- 
applied. God has a plan for all lives; that plan includes sudden 
termination of life for all the passengers on the vessel but one. In 
that abrupt taking off there may be nothing whatever of penalty, 
or discrimination, or undervaluing of the worthiness of the lives 
that have been led. I believe that it is right to return thanks to God 
for deliverance from death, and those who do it the most heartily 
will be the least likely to arrogate to themselves any invidious inter- 
ference in their own behalf. 

In the dead of night, on one of the battle-fields of our late war, 
two companion soldiers lay sleeping side by side. In temporary 
discomfort the one roused the other, saying, "Roll over, John." 
He promptly complied, his companion turning into the very place 
where he had been lying. Falling into a deep slumber, only the 
morning light awakened John, and there by his side lay the corpse 
of his comrade. Death had come in the swift flight of a single 
stray bullet, and without a groan, his spirit had returned to God 
who gave it. And there by the side of that dear, dead friend, the 
surviving soldier vowed that he would devote his life to the service 
of God. He is to-day one of the most prominent and honored 
clergymen in the city of New York. You may believe about it as 
you choose, but I believe that there is a divinity that shapes our 
ends, lovingly to win us to duty here and Heaven hereafter. 

As to Mr. Ingersoll's fling at the Thanksgiving proclamations, 
which are issued whether we have good times or bad, I am con- 
tent to let that go without further word; it is an unintended but 
significant tribute to the power of religion to make us at all times 
thankful. 

So with regard to the objection he makes to loving God, on the 
ground that we cannot love the unknown, but we can love each 
other. Well, this process of acquiring the love of the unseen 
through the seen, is just what the Bible calls for: " He that loveth 
not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he 
hath not seen ? " 



The Fall of Man. 



The doctrine of the Fall of Man Mr. Ingersoll denounces with 
great vehemence. " If you find any man who believes in the 
Garden of Eden story, strike here (tapping his forehead), and you 
will hear an echo — something is for rent." We will apply the *test 
strictly according to directions. Here are President Porter of Yale, 
President McCosh of Princeton and President Seelye of Amherst; 
I ask them, in Mr. Ingersoll's presence: "Gentlemen, do you 
believe in the Garden of Eden story?" "That story to us," they 
answer, " is like the changed, but dearly-loved face of an old 
familiar friend. After all due allowance is made for shifted inter- 
pretations, the substantial truth of that story is the same as when we 
learned it in childhood; we believe in the Garden of Eden story." 
Then I do just as I was told to do by Mr. Ingersoll, strike on his own 
great, round, roomy skull, and sure enough, I hear an echo. Some- 
thing is for rent, and to the largest audiences that will bid for its 
drivel at one dollar per head. How do you know but that there 
was a Fall upward, instead of downward as we have hitherto held ? 

Man, in his original state, according to the Bible account, was 
morally at zero. As Holland expresses it: 

" God seeks for virtue; you for innocence. 
You'll find it in the cradle — nowhere else 
Save in your dreams, among the grown-up babes 
That dwelt in Eden — powerless, pulpy souls 
That showed a dimple for each touch of sin." 

Ignorant of the difference between right and wrong, the Fall may 
have been a forward, and, in one sense, upward stride on the part 
of man, for it brought to him this painful knowledge of evil. And if 
it be asked how we can continue to speak of the Fall of Man when the 
meaning is reversed, I reply that to speak of the sun rising and 
setting is an exact parallel. This you may set aside as a mere theory, 
but so is much of our current scientific teaching mere theory. Let 
us be in no haste to discard the Bible until there is shown to be 



3° 

nothing of worth there for us to think about. But Mr. Ingersoll 
objects to having a representative act for him. " Before I am 
bound by a representative," he says, " I want a chance to vote for 
or against him." Well, I presume he would claim that if he had 
had a chance to vote against his Christian parentage, he would have 
done it; though I very much doubt, notwithstanding his blatant in- 
fidelity, whether he would, if the chance were given him, elect to come 
into this world by a scoffing father and an unbelieving mother. Be 
that as it may, by the law of heredity, he is bound by a long line of 
ancestors as his representatives, and to whom, without his consent 
or volition, he owes his habits, tendencies, characteristics, and pretty 
much everything except that which is his curse, viz., his infidelity. 
But "sin and death entered the world," and with that he flies off at 
a tangent, fuming and spluttering and raving about the horrible 
idea of God inventing, revengefully, fevers and pains and earthquakes 
and pangs, when all that the creed intimates here is that these 
entered the world as a consequence of sin, following in the inevi- 
table track of a law, not hurled angrily down by one of the gods of 
the effete theology of Olympus. 

As to the great doctrine of the Atonement, he contents himself with 
the bald assertion that it is absurd. And therefore I will content my- 
self with the counter-statement that, aside from all theories of Atone- 
ment, the fact of Atonement through the infinite mercy of God in 
Christ, is corroborated by abundant analogy in life, yearned for by 
the heart of man, and demanded in view of a world lying in sin. 

Total Depravity. 

The doctrine of Total Depravity, he thinks, is a libel upon the 
human race. His tender, compassionate heart regards it as a sort 
of insult to the dimpled babies in the cradle, that sometimes distort 
those dimples by furious outbursts of passion which cause the mother 



3i 



to ponder the deep problem how and where sin originates. Rest 
easy: this doctrine utters no libel; it has no need for so doing. It 
simply'points to facts. If there is a libel, it is there before the doc- 
trine gets on the ground. 

Not hesitating at the most daring and uncalled for cavils, but ap- 
parently' introducing them merely to give spice to his profane 
diatribe, he impugns the work of the Creator, recommending that 
" if God cannot make a soul that is not totally depraved he had 
better retire from the business." Leaving out of sight, for a moment, 
the awful blasphemy of which he is here guilty, he reminds one of 
an ignorant and self-conceited school-boy, freely criticising the work 
of an artist or a skilled mechanic; how much of the plan, purpose, or 
ultimate aim is in either case understood ? A little more modesty of 
opinion, and a little less assumption of the attributes of omniscience, 
would form a refreshing variation in Mr. Ingersoll's pretensions. 
Sometimes criticism does not have much weight. I was once preach- 
ing to an audience of some four or five hundred persons in the city of 
Washington. At the opening of the service the prayer of invocation 
was interrupted by a man in the back part of the house, who rose 
and said to me, "Stop just there; you've left something out.' I 
speedily terminated the prayer and sat down, when I found that the 
man was being peremptorily ejected from the house. Yet from that 
day to this I have never troubled myself to think whether I really did 
leave anything out that ought to have been in, for the simple reason 
that that man who interrupted me was a lunatic, and every member 
of that congregation was a lunatic except the attendants, for I was 
preaching to the inmates of the Government Asylum for the Insane. 

Mr. Ingersoll rails furiously at the doctrine of Regeneration, which 
provides that through the " new birth" alone men shall enter into 
the kingdom of God. But if in all the upward processes of nature 
barriers are encountered, separating mind from matter, the organic 
from the inorganic, so that only through the downward reach of 
potency, from the higher to the lower forms of life, development can 



32 



proceed,— if this be the law in the natural world, why should it be 
thought a thing incredible if that same law should hold good in the 
spiritual world f 

Inspiration. 

Mr. Ingersoll spurns the doctrine of the Inspiration of the 
Scriptures. What are his reasons ? He says that the Being 
who wrote the Bible didn't know the shape of the world he had 
made. Now this creed says that the Scriptures were written by 
men; why does he speak of "the Being " who wrote them. But if 
they were written by men under the special guidance of the Holy 
Spirit, then, Mr. Ingersoll's argument, I presume, would be, Why 
did not the Holy Spirit guide Darwin, and Huxley, and Herbert 
Spencer to the side of the sacred penmen when they wrote, in order 
that their writings might be scientifically accurate ? Well, is even 
the advanced science of the nineteenth century prepared to speak 
its final and decisive word on the origin and construction of the 
universe ? Huxley doesn't seem to be so prepared. Here is a 
broadside from him in which he turns his guns for the time on his 
own camp: "If a General Council of the Church Agnostic were 
held," he says, " very likely I should be condemned as a heretic. 
On the whole, the bosh of heterodoxy is more offensive to me than 
that of orthodoxy, because heterodoxy professes to be guided by 
reason and science, and orthodoxy does not." Of Herbert Spencer, 
Lionel S. Beale says: "Herbert Spencer's books contain so much 
false physiology that in ten years they will not be read except as 
literary curiosities." Tyndal says, " Those who hold to the doctrine 
of Evolution are by no means ignorant of the uncertainty of their 
data, and they only yield to it a provisional assent." These, mark 
you, are not the criticisms of bigoted theologians. If Mr. Ingersoll's 
knowledge were not of such a sophomoric type, he would see the 
advisability of waiting at least until we know a little more ourselves 



33 



about the creation of the universe, before we drop the account thereof 
which, while not purporting to teach science, has for these prolonged 
centuries been teaching truths concerning creation which no science 
can overthrow. 

Polygamy and Slavery. 

But here come out the stock objections to Inspiration, on the 
ground of the toleration of polygamy and slavery in Bible times. 
These bugbears furnish the infidel with this staple objections and 
trusted weapons in his crusade against the Sacred Scriptures. I ask 
you to notice that here Mr. Ingersoll skillfully throws dust in the 
eyes of his audience, and utilizes the strong anti-slavery and anti- 
polygamous sentiments in which we have been educated, as a lever- 
age upon which to operate his destructive infidelity. He makes 
himself merry over the old idea of the starry firmament as a solid 
concave without distinctions of distance between the heavenly bodies; 
but he himself squeezes the events of history, remote and near, down 
to the dead level of contemporaneous thought. He charges the 
Bible with upholding slavery and polygamy; but it never upholds 
them. The most it does is to temporarily tolerate them, in order to 
restrain and restrict, and finally eradicate and eliminate them alto- 
gether. Moses, leading the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, has 
become an inspiration for all time, leading the masses from slavery or 
oppression to freedom. The progress of the race is necessarily slow. 
Promiscuous association, polygamy, monogamy; savagery, slavery, 
liberty — these are the upward steps. In the progress of the Jewish 
nation, and under the uplifting influence of the Old Testament 
revelation, polygamy died out, so that it was finally left forever behind 
them, along with idolatry, on the return from the Babylonish cap- 
tivity. Strange that any one should be capable of charging the 
Bible with protecting polygamy and slavery, when both disappear 
under its influence. Abraham Lincoln said that under the light of 



54 



this book human bondage could not live a moment. " If the devil," 
says Mr. Ingersoll, " had written upon the subject of slavery, which 
side would he have taken ? " That depends somewhat upon circum- 
stances. In the year 1845, at an abolition meeting held at the 
Broadway Tabernacle, in New York, Wendell Phillips introduced 
his lecture, amid a storm of hisses, by offering the following resolu- 
tion: "Resolved, that the only exodus for the American slaves out 
of their house of bondage, is over the ruins of the American Church 
and the American Union." Then and there, I think, the devil was 
an abolitionist. When in all their helpless ignorance, utterly unpre- 
pared for the responsibilities of citizenship, the blacks received the 
elective franchise, and thus became the debased tools of rascally 
demagogues and carpet-baggers, then hell set up high carnival over 
the first pernicious fruits of abolitionism. I know that, as Macaulay 
says, " the only cure for the evils of a newly-acquired freedom is — 
freedom;" but short-sighted Hell shouted over the immediate curse, 
Heaven, looking farther, rejoiced over the ultimate blessing. Well 
is it for us that the plans of the Infinite God move forward in the 
ordering of the affairs of this world, without reference to the childish 
and petulent cavils of an Ingersoll. If he had a longer head and a 
little wider scope of vision he would spend the rest of his days 
apologizing for his captious objections against the book that is the 
sheet-anchor of human liberty and enlightenment. 



Missions. 



As to the prospects of the prevalence of the kingdom of God in 
- the world Mr. Ingersoll ventures upon the rashest and most unintel- 
ligent ridicule. He appears to be unaware that in assailing the work 
of Christian missions, he is simply butting his head against the most 
impregnable stronghold of the Christian faith; for here, to-day, its 
successes are, in all sober language, dazzling in their brilliancy. 
Never an intelligent Hindoo converted ? Why, some in this audience 



35 



must have seen and heard Nerayan Sheshadri, with turbaned head, 
proclaiming on his visit to this country, in pure and distinct Eng- 
lish, the unsearchable riches of Christ. Moncure D. Conway re- 
cently visited India, and says that he looked in almost hopeless 
despair upon "that vast rotting jungle of dead religions." I only 
know that Buddhism has been in existence in that country for 2,500 
years, and Mohammedanism for 1,000 years, while Christianity has 
been at work but 70 years, and there are now over 600 ordained 
missionaries there, more than 700 native preachers, and about 140,- 
000 communicant members in the different Churches. No converts 
in China? It is just 42 years since Christianity was admitted to 
China; now there are 300 Churches with upwards of 20,000 members. 
How does Mr. Ingersoll evade the force of these facts ? By casting 
out scurrilous insinuations as to the accuracy of the reports. Reduce 
these figures, then, to the utmost satisfaction of whatever suspicion 
you may be willing to harbor, and is it conceivable that they embody 
a monstrous falsehood, perpetrated and maintained under fire of 
repeated investigations on the part of travelers ? 



Resurrection. 

The doctrine of the Resurrection Mr. Ingersoll feels called upon 
to denounce as an absurdity. In his authorized report of this lecture, 
he states truthfully that this new Congregational creed asserts only 
the resurrection of the dead, the statement of a belief in the resur- 
rection of the body occurring in the Apostles' Creed, which is used 
in admitting members. Why, then, does he go round the country say- 
ing: "The next thing that I find in this Congregational creed is, that 
they believe in the literal resurrection of the body?" What excuse is 
there for misrepresentation, when his own authorized publication 
shows that he knew the facts in the case. But he entertains his 
audience with a discussion of the absurdity of supposing that divine 



36 



power is equal to the task of separating the different particles, for 
example, of the bodies of a missionary and a cannibal by whom he 
has been devoured. Now, remember that this Congregational creed 
does not call for, or at least require, a belief in the resurrection of 
the material body, teaching simply the resurrection of the dead; 
which fact Mr. Ingersoll admits in print, but conceals in speech. 
But even as to this belief in the literal resurrection of the human 
body, if a scientist can puzzle and confound a savage, or even an 
ignorant boor, by passing a magnet through a pile of sawdust, and 
drawing forth the iron filings concealed therein, shall we gainsay 
the assertion that the Infinite God is able to recover the scattered 
particles of every human body, whether from the dust of the earth, 
or the depths of the sea, or the vapors and gases of the consuming 
fire? 

He ridicules the observance of the Sabbath by asking whether 
there can be anything more absurd than that a space of time can be 
holy ? Why, I should say that there is nothing more reasonable 
than that such a space is made holy by using it for holy ends. No 
one supposes that the sacred ness of the day of rest attaches to the 
particular division of time itself, with which Mr. Ingersoll juggles. 
Why not emphasize the value of the principle of resting one day in 
seven ? Why not point out the inestimable blessing this has been to 
mankind ? 

Some Nibblings. 

No one can deny that Mr. Ingersoll is capable of going to the 
very farthest lengths of unblushing and audacious blasphemy: what- 
ever credit that concession implies, he is fairly entitled to. In his 
view there is no such thing as holy ground. Listen to that beauti- 
ful tribute by the Roman Catholic divine, Faber, to the worth of 
the Bible in the hands of the Protestant Englishman: " It lives on in 
the ear like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of 



37 



church bells, which the convert hardly knows how long he can forego. 
The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of 
childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the griefs and 
trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative 
of his best moments; and all that there has been about him of soft 
and gentle and pure and penitent and good, speaks to him for ever 
out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing which doubt never 
dimmed, and controversy never soiled." Yet up and down through 
this sacred volume Mr. Ingersoll relentlessly gallops, little recking 
how much of hallowed impression he ruthlessly wounds. We have 
been familiar for some time with his virulent assaults upon the book, 
but in this present lecture his temerity finds limits which have not 
before been reached. He wantonly assails the flawless character of 
Christ — Christ, to whom Richter paid that notable tribute: "He 
who was the Holiest among the mighty, and the Mightiest among 
the holy, has, with his pierced hand, lifted heathenism off its hinges, 
and turned the dolorous and accursed centuries into new channels, 
and now governs the ages." Yet our indignation at his reckless 
profanity speedily passes into inward satisfaction at his self-defeat- 
ing rashness. The character of Christ forms the Gibraltar of 
Christian evidence; let those take it who can. Here the prof oundest 
thinkers of the world gather in study, contemplation, and, with 
sparse exceptions, reverent adoration. Yet " fools rush in where 
angels fear to tread." Robert Hall was once asked what he thought 
of Thomas Paine's " Age of Reason." "Think of it," he replied, 
"it's a mouse nibbling at the wing of an archangel." As I look 
over Mr. Ingersoll s objections to Christ, I can think of no better 
word with which to characterize these little cavils than that word 
"nibbling." It is amazing that even he would be willing to submit 
to even the umpirage of a popular audience, such flimsy strictures 
on this problem of all problems. David Strauss was a man of un- 
questioned ability; he thought it necessary to carry on his investiga- 
tions of this subject through a period of thirty-eight years. In 1835 



3» 



he explained the life of Christ on the ground of pantheism; in. 
1864 on that of naturalistic theism ; in 1873 he is stranded in the 
wreck of a materialistic atheism. I have always thought that if 
unbelief were only given rope enough, it would in every case conduct 
its own execution, as in this case. But I cite this to show that the 
discussion of the problem of the character of Christ calls for deep 
and sound thought, not trifling caricature. For this reason I do 
not feel obliged to do more than refer to one or two of the objec- 
tions which Mr. Ingersoll here makes: " If Christ be the Son of God," 
he says, " let that truth be written across the face of the heavens, and 
let it grow on every leaf." It would be the most visionary of all 
surmises to expect that even then it would be beyond his cavils. 
Above, it would be of too unearthly brightness; below, of altogether 
too common a hue. But here we differ on a fundamental point, 
viz., that the only, or the best things we are to believe, come to us 
through demonstration to the senses. But does it not seem a little 
hard that a man should be damned for rejecting this dogma, when 
he cannot possibly give it his intellectual assent ? No, because a man 
is never damned for this cause. But should not God put in black 
and white, and beyond the possibility of cavil, the things we are 
expected to believe? Not any more than that the teacher should 
demonstrate everything for the pupil, sparing the latter all toil and 
thought and study. 

Mr. Ingersoll rejects the miraculous origin of Jesus Christ because 
he does not think the direct historical evidence sufficient. Suppos- 
ing, then, that he weighs (which it does not seem to occur to him to 
do) the evidence arising from the character of Christ itself, as 
making his human origin improbable, and his miraculous origin 
highly probable. 

He denies that Christ rose from the dead because he failed to 
exhibit himself to Pilate and Herod and public men. This objection 
is as old as Spinoza, at least. If he had so exhibited himself, would 
they not have charged him with having feigned death ? Would not 



39 



Ingersoll have chimed in and said: " Yes, this very public display looks 
suspicious." His demand amounts to this, that it was incumbent 
upon Christ not only to furnish the thing to be believed, but to con- 
strain men to believe it. And it also suggests the superior wisdom 
of offering the precious truth then revealed to the custody of railers 
and scoffers, to depositing it in the keeping of men who, when 
compelled by evidence, against their prior beliefs and expectations, 
to accept it, would stand by it till death. 

The Ascension. 

Mr. Ingersoll's objection to the Ascension is that if Christ went 
at night he would go in one direction, if in the day-time he would 
travel in a different direction, on account of the revolution of the 
earth, of which there was then no suspicion. Smart school-boy 
difficulty ! Never raise your hand in a court of justice to swear, be- 
cause Mr. Ingersoll may possibly be about, to suggest that you are 
pointing in a different direction from that which you would if it 
were night. Don't say the sun will rise to-morrow, for fear that 
smart Mr. Ingersoll may correct you by saying that it is you that rise 
with the earth in its revolution where you can see the sun. Never 
point your children to the stars, as you tell them of the peaceful 
home on high, where men cease their cavils, for again you may sub- 
ject yourself to ridicule. The Ascension of Christ to me is the 
completion of the process of the Resurrection, which had been in 
progress during the forty days since he burst the bands of the 
sepulchre, which process was illustrative and confirmatory of the fact 
of our resurrection. At the Ascension, the physical body finally 
passed into the glorified body, and this into that eternity which is 
not conditioned by space. Before the splendors of Olivet, these 
"nibblings" are seen to be insignificant puerilities. As to the in- 
complete records of this occurrence, and the omission to mention it 
on the part of one of the evangelists, it must be borne in mind, as 



4° 



has over and over been said, in such cases, that omissions are not 
contradictions. Father Lambert, in this connection, gives Ingersoll 
some pertinent advice about confounding the last words of Christ 
recorded by the Evangelists, with those which purported to be the 
last words he spoke. Ingersoll, however, confessed to an Era re- 
porter that he had not read Father Lambert's work, except to glance 
over the first pages. 

Miracles. 

Mr. Ingersoll, of course, rejects miracles. We are coming to 
regard the subject of miracles more strictly in reference to their 
historical occurrence; and we are coming to see that for this age, 
Christianity confirms miracles, rather than that miracles prove Chris- 
tianity. Remember that the Hebrew mind had been habituated to 
this evidence of the Divine presence in all its past history. The 
Pharisees acknowledged the miracles of Christ, but attributed them 
to the agency of Beelzebub. They held it to be their duty to ad- 
here to the law of Moses, and Christ taught that this allegiance 
should be transferred to himself; those who accepted this teaching 
became Christians, those who rejected it held that Christ was guilty 
of blasphemy, and on this charge, but mainly because he disap- 
pointed the glowing temporal expectations that centered in the 
anticipation of the Messiah, he was crucified. No one who has any 
proper historic insight will feel any force in Mr. Ingersoll's opinion 
that men would never have crucified one who had really raised the 
dead, since the way we would act in such a case is no criterion of 
the course that would be naturally pursued at that time, and by 
that people. 

"Did it ever occur to you," Mr. Ingersoll asks, "that if God 
wrote the Old Testament [but this creed says it was written by 
men] and told the Jews to crucify or kill anybody that disagreed 
with them on religion [but God never told the Jews to do any 



4> 



such thing, nor stipulated any such reason as sufficient or proper] 
and that this God afterwards took upon himself flesh and came to 
Jerusalem and taught a different religion [different, though, only as 
the unfolding germ differs from the blossom full-blown] and the 
Jews killed him — did it ever occur to you that he reaped exactly 
what he had sown ?" Well, no; but it has occurred to numberless 
observers that the Jewish nation — not referring now to individual's 
thereof — scattered and peeled and driven to the ends of the earth, 
a perpetuated nationality, but without a government or a country, 
have reaped what they have sown, for their disobedience to God and 
unfaithfulness to the ancient Covenant. And it occurs to me that 
when any man sows the seeds of slander, especially the slander of 
the good God above us, he will inevitably reap, one day, an unwel- 
come harvest of remorse and shame. 

Everlasting Punishment. 



We now come to the consideration of that which constitutes Mr. 
Ingersoll's principal gravamen against the Christian religion, viz., 
the doctrine of everlasting punishment. He has concluded never 
to deliver a lecture without attacking this doctrine, and rather than 
have it true he would have savagery or chaos displace civilization. 
Manifestly, whatever is believed here, is accepted from conviction 
and not from desire, and must, therefore, be fortified with some 
arguments or considerations of probability, which deserve to be fairly 
weighed; and, therefore, at this point I must beseech Mr. Ingersoll 
to keep cool and not froth at the mouth in his ferocious displeasure, 
simply in order that we may look at the subject in a dispassion- 
ate manner. Fiercely attacking and scornfully rejecting the Old 
Testament, yet he declares that he prefers it to the New, because, 
as he expresses it, " In the Old Testament when God had a man 



42 

dead, he let him alone; but in the New Testament the trouble com- 
mences at death." That is tersely put; let us sift out the truth it 
contains. 

The Old Testament. 

The Old Testament does not furnish an explicit revelation of a 
future life. By abundant revelations the old Hebrews knew God in 
this life as a long-suffering and merciful God, and tender, pitying 
and loving Heavenly Father. What gave gloom to death and the 
grave, was this very fear that God would let them alone at death, and 
in the unknown world of shadows they might not be able to find their 
great Protector and Friend. But notice particularly, here, that all 
through the Old Testament, the fact of a future life is taken for 
granted, assumed to be true. For this reason those who died are 
spoken of as being "gathered to their fathers," and, as Christ 
showed, when they spoke of the God of Abraham and Isaac and 
Jacob, although these patriarchs were long since dead, this implied 
their continued existence, since God is not the God of the dead, 
but of the living. To say that the Old Testament contains not a 
single burial service, is nonsensical. Neither does the New Testa- 
ment contain a formal burial service; but both are equally rich in 
materials for this purpose. Between the Old Testament and the 
New, the Graeco-Roman civilizations were developed. They im- 
pressed upon the human mind grossly material conceptions of the 
future world, with its division into Heaven and Hell. And from 
the Oriental civilizations came the belief of the Jews in the time 
of Christ in a resurrection, which was also grossly sensual. 

The New Testament. 

It was the mission of Christ to embody religion in the Perfect 
Life, to transfer the hope of immortality from dreary uncertainty 
to immovable conviction, and to reveal in his own Person " the 



4.5 



Resurrection and the Life." Mr. Ingersoll asks: " If Christ was in 
fact God, why did he not plainly say there is another life ? " 
Shameful question. " In my Father's house are many mansions, if 
it were not so I would have told you." Could language be plainer 
than that ? The Gospel of Christ was couched in the modes of 
expression of contemporaneous thought, yet it eliminated the 
grossness of old-world conceptions, and purified and exalted the 
notions of mankind concerning eternity. Never, since Christ, has 
the attempt prevailed to remand the hope of immortality to the 
uncertainties and shadows of human speculation, or to rob the 
future world of its grand inspirations and restraints. The revela- 
tion which Christ brought, has all along been soiled with either the 
mischievous tinting or the ghastly coloring of lingering pagan- 
ism, but its sublime portraiture of eternity, has, in spite of all this, 
commanded reverent and thoughtful acceptation. 

Where Does the Trouble Commence ?' 

Mr. Ingersoll says the New Testament makes the trouble com- 
mence at death; just the reverse of this is the truth. The trouble 
never commences at death. If sin has not troubled before death, 
eternity can not trouble after death; and if, in any case, trouble 
comes after death, it will be always because the trouble commenced 
and inveterately kept on in life. " Whatsoever a man soweth, that 
shall he also reap." This is the law of penalty. And if a single 
act, bounded by a brief but fatal moment, may blast a life, who 
knows but that a life, bounded by the fleeting years allotted to it 
may blast its inheritance in the great eternity beyond. 

Damnation. 

Ingersoll says that God is going to damn everybody. Notice 
how he loves to mouth this word "damnation." He rolls it under 
his tongue as a choice morsel for the utterance of his profane 



44 



infidelity. The Revised Version drops the word altogether, sub- 
stituting " judgment," " condemnation," "destruction;" that seals 
the fate of the Revised Version as far as Ingersoll is concerned — ■ 
he'll never adopt it. Now, as to this assertion that Christian 
doctrine damns the majority of mankind, in the name of orthodoxy, 
I stamp it as false. According to the belief of the Evangelical 
Churches, the saved will constitute the immense majority of the 
human race; those who are finally lost will be an inconsiderable 
number. And Christian doctrine is such that unless it is over- 
strained in one direction, it can not possibly teach anything else. 
Dr. Guthrie once said: " My belief is that in the end there will be a 
vastly larger number saved than we have any conception of. What 
sort of earthly government would that be where more than half the 
subjects were in prison ? I can not believe that the government of 
God will be like that." Ingersoll, however, steals his thunder, 
raves about the " everlasting penitentiary," and denounces ortho- 
doxy for a hideous belief which she herself denounces as unscrip- 
tural and untrue. 

Here let me say that Christian doctrine never puts a single indi- 
vidual in hell; from this statement I defy dislodgement. Never 
does Christian doctrine single out an individual, or authorize such 
singling out, and say he is in hell. Why, even of Judas, the most 
universally execrated wretch known to Christendom, the disciples 
simply said that he went to his own place. The consequences of 
sin are clearly laid down; these are to be plainly and faithfully 
stated; but no one is authorized to mete out doom in the case of 
any individual, and thus usurp the place of the Judge of all the 
earth, who will assuredly do right. 

Nor, again, does any one hold or dream of holding the doctrine of 
hell as "glad tidings of great joy." Calvin held it as "a horrible 
decree, yet true." I have heard of ministers preaching this doc- 
trine with tears in their eyes, never flinching from what they under- 



45 



stood to be the truth on this subject, yet as tender as a father 
admonishing his child. Has infidelity anything that requires this 
sort of preaching ? 

Mr. Ingersoll says the Church must not abandon its belief in a 
devil; no fear of that. So long as he is roaming the country over 
sowing the seeds of doubt, and, as some one expresses it, preaching 
the good God out of the world, — the evidence in favor of the con- 
tinued existence, and sleepless diligence of the arch-enemy of man- 
kind, remains quite conclusive. Ingersoll is a perfect adept in 
plastering hell over with pretty verbiage so as to hide its ugliness. 
He finds genuine sympathy there because Dives begged that 
Lazarus might be sent to his five brethren. Is remorse repentance ? 
Or is the tale of suffering friends told by a lazy, lying, whimpering 
beggar to be taken for real sympathy ? 

Human Love. 

He thinks, too, that this doctrine destroys human love. " Love," 
he says, " paints every picture and chisels every statue. It is like a 
lily with a heart of fire." But if we could get him to dismount 
from his Pegasus he would have to admit that love, instead of stand- 
ing around painting pictures and chiseling statues, gets up in the 
morning and chops the wood and kindles the fire, and does not 
eternally brag of it, either. Why, if this gush about love were intro- 
duced on its own account, I should be led to suspect that Mr. Inger- 
soll was a thoroughly disagreeable man in his own home, for that is 
just the sort of man who would be likely to prate about domestic 
bliss when traveling among strangers. But you see he artfully works 
in all this clap-trap in order to throw dust in the eyes of his audi- 
ence, while he sucks out the very marrow of Christianity, that, by 
transfusion of it, he may flesh up the bodiless ghost of his decrepit 
infidelity. He is constantly talking of men who loved their wives and 
women who loved their husbands going into the eternal separation of 



4 6 



hell. But the Bible peoples hell with " dogs and sorcerers and whore- 
mongers and murderers and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and 
maketh a lie." " What consolation has the orthodox minister for the 
widow of an unbeliever, a good, brave, kind man ? " He has the con- 
solation of not being obliged to say, "we do not know whether death 
is a wall or a door, the beginning or end of a day." And he has the 
blessed consolation to offer that since God " is long-suffering to us- 
ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come 
to repentance," none can finally be lost except those who will not be 
saved. But is not the supposition to be entertained of the possi- 
bility of a wife securing salvation, and a husband failing to secure 
it, and consequently eternal separation sundering forever their 
sincere human love ? That is undoubtedly a legitimate hypothesis, 
and those who wish to vex themselves worrying over it can do so. 
I only know this, that, when I have sat in a court of justice, and 
heard conflicting testimony given and opposing arguments urged, 
I have wondered how the judge would possibly be able to consider 
and weigh and sift all this confused matter and reach a just and 
satisfactory decision. And I have been surprised and delighted to 
see the marvelous skill with which this was accomplished. The 
analogy is poor and imperfect, but I am satisfied that even in the 
cases of largest conceivable difficulty, the scales of Divine justice 
will be so accurately balanced that we shall all see for ourselves that 
his judgments are righteous altogether. What an atrocious charge 
Mr. Ingersoll makes, not shrinking in the slightest degree from 
the most defiant blasphemy, when he says that God demands 
that we shall forgive our enemies, while he proposes to damn his. 
Lightly comparing the tardy and reluctant forgiveness that we 
accord with the free and boundless mercy of God, unconditionally 
offered, and the deliberate and scornful rejection of which alone can 
result in final condemnation! But "God can not afford to damn a 
man in the next world who has made a happy home in this." That 
depends; gamblers often have happy homes; happy homes are 



47 



sometimes planted upon the wrecked fortunes of rivals supplanted 
by perfidy; sometimes they are supported by money that is meanly 
filched from the slender earnings of the poor. But supposing the 
happiness is pure and true, unstained and ideally good. Then, I 
presume, there is no need of apprehension in view of eternity. 

Salvation by Faith. 

Well, is it not necessary to believe ? Most certainly. What do 
you mean by believing in Christ ? The catechism answer makes it 
to consist in a true sense of sin, an apprehension of Divine mercy, 
grief and hatred of sin, and turning from it with the purpose to sin 
no more. Is not a belief in the doctrine of the Trinity, or some 
particular form of the doctrine of the Atonement, or an intellectual 
conviction of the everlasting nature of the torments of hell, neces- 
sary to salvation ? No. What, then, about Mr. Ingersoll's charge 
that Christianity makes salvation dependent upon intellectual belief ? 
It is an inexcusable misrepresentation of the orthodoxy of to-day. 
But does not the Bible say: " He that believeth shall be saved; but 
he that believeth not shall be damned ?" Yes, but this is not the 
utterance of a threat,, but the statement of a law; and it lays down 
the principle, broad, deep and true, that in the atmosphere of faith 
the soul grows; under the chilling fog of doubt it suffers paralysis 
and death. 

Do not be deceived by Mr. Ingersoll's bluster; he is likely to 
mislead you by his silly preferences. He prefers "a good, cool 
grave" and "eternal sleep." -But what will his preferences amount 
to in the assizes of eternity ? He boasts about how indignantly he 
would demur if it were provided that he should consort with an 
angel. He is like the school-boy who pompously announces his 
intention to resist a threatened punishment, but quickly knuckles 
under when it comes. So would it be with Robert. If the angels 
who kept not their first estate were punished, it is conceivable that 



48 



angels may be subject to punishment in the future; and it might 
even be that for some heinous offense an angel might be condemned 
to associate for a time with a blasphemous infidel. If that should 
happen, depend upon it, the promised resistance on the part of the 
infidel would not be forthcoming. He would be just as submissive 
as any common miscreant in the hands of a muscular policeman. 

Eternal vs. Everlasting. 

I regret very much that Mr. Ingersoll is so densely ignorant; but 
for this I might tell him some things that would be for his advan- 
tage, as, for instance, this, that when he rails against everlasting 
punishment, he hits the mark he is aiming at; but when he 
denounces eternal punishment, which he does the more frequently, 
he misses that mark. Scholars are distinguishing now between 
eternal punishment, that which is peculiar to eternity, and ever- 
lasting punishment, which in the full force of the Anglo-Saxon, 
where it originates, means punishment that is endless. And I may 
also say that evangelical thought is gravitating toward the accept- 
ance of the former in distinction from the latter. Endlessness is, in 
fact, out of place in the concept of eternity, since distinctions of 
time are there obliterated. And virtually, all that is commonly 
meant when we speak of the endlessness of future punishment, is 
that the opportunity for salvation is confined to this life. And 
even here, Mr. Ingersoll fails to notice (which would be too much 
to expect of him) that this new Congregational creed asserts its 
belief in everlasting punishment only as one of the issues of a 
final judgment, saying nothing about the redemptive work that 
may be carried on between death and the judgment, in which many 
who accept this creed believe. 

The Hell of Paganism. 

Now, as to this whole vivid, but brutal portraiture of hell, which 
Mr. Ingersoll succeeds in placing so graphically before his audiences, 



49 



I repudiate it utterly-as foreign to Christianity and the Bible. It 
could no more be expected that a Christian apologist would accept 
this delineation of hell, than that Mr. Blaine would accept the 
" tattooed man " of the caricaturists as his own photograph. And 
even if it should be admitted that Ingersoll's strictures upon the 
doctrine of hell are in some degree warranted, in view of certain 
vulnerable forms in which the Christian faith has been held in the 
past, let it be remembered that by the very terms of this lecture we 
are asked to consider, not an obsolete orthodoxy, but the orthodoxy 
of to-day. Where, then, do the materials for this picture come from ? 
Do they originate in the brain of Mr. Ingersoll?. Not at all; even 
this is too much to expect from such a source. I will tell you where 
they come from; they come out of the benighted brain and the 
depraved heart of paganism. When Eneas applied to the Sibyl to 
guide him to the nether world that he might consult his deceased 
father, Anchises, you remember her answer: "The descent of 
Avernus is easy; the gate of Pluto stands open day and night; but 
to retrace one's steps and return to the upper air — that is the toil, 
that the difficulty." Nevertheless, she accompanied him on his errand. 
The entrance to the Infernal- Regions was in the volcanic country 
about Vesuvius, emitting its sulphurous flames and mephitic vapors. 
About its mouth swarmed griefs, cares, diseases, the hundred-armed 
Briareus, hissing Hydras and fire-breathing Chimaeras. Down 
below Charon ferried the spirits over the Cocytus, refusing those 
who had not received due burial rites. Beyond, in the regions of 
sadness, young infants and suicides wailed out their woe. Then 
the paths diverged, the one leading to Elysium, the other, guarded 
by Furies nourishing their whips of scorpions, leading to Tartarus, 
the abode of the damned. There Eneas saw just what Mr. Ingersoll 
describes in the tale of Orpheus,, with which he closes his lecture: 
Tityus, the giant, with the vulture preying upon his ever-growing 
liver; Ixion, fastened to his ceaselessly revolving wheel; Sisyphus, 
rolling up the hill the huge stone which ever rolled back; Tantalus, 



5° 



vainly striving to assuage his thirst, and the daughters of Danaus, 
condemned to the futile work of dipping water with a sieve. (Here 
notice Mr. Ingersoll's egregious blunder in speaking of the daughters 
of the Danaides. The veriest smatterer in Latin sees at once that 
the word " Danaides " is a patronymic, and means the daughters of 
Danaus.) But what is all this but everlasting punishment, and of 
that very coarse and gross description that Mr. Ingersoll revels in, 
and vainly tries to fasten upon the Christian faith? 



Ingersoll's Decrees. 

Into this pagan hell he puts a long list of individuals, whom he 
mentions by name. Notice a few of these names: First, there is 
Benjamin Franklin; what did he do? He introduced the motion * 
in the convention that framed the Constitution, that daily prayers 
be offered, eloquently supporting his proposition by a speech, in 
which he expressed his unwavering faith in a prayer-hearing God, 
whose providence guided the affairs of men and nations. What 
else did he do ? He wrote a letter to an infidel, supposed to be 
Thomas Paine, urging the suppression of one of his forthcoming 
works. In that letter he said, referring to the debt this infidel 
owed to religion on account of his early training: " Among us it 
is not necessary, as among the Hottentots, that a youth, to be raised 
into the company of men, should prove his manhood by beating 
his mother. I would advise you, therefore, not to attempt unchain- 
ing the tiger, but to burn this piece before it is seen by any other 
person." If Mr. Ingersoll followed the sound advice of Benjamin 
Franklin he would never deliver another of his infidel lectures. 
And it nettles him to think of this; so he lays his ruthless hands 
upon grand old Benjamin Franklin and hurls him down into the 
black caverns of his pagan hell. David Hume he puts there; why? 
David Hume repudiated infidelity. He wrote to Dr. Blair: " I 



5' 



could wish your friend had not denominated me an infidel writer." 
Amidst the shock of his mother's death, in reply to the charge that 
he had relinquished all Christian hope, he said: "Though I throw 
out my speculations to entertain the learned and metaphysical 
world, yet in other things I do not think so differently from the 
rest of the world as you imagine." Thomas Jefferson gave this 
testimony: "I have always said, and always will say, that the 
studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, 
better fathers and better husbands." At the age of eighty-two, 
Jefferson wrote to his namesake, as follows: " Adore God. Rever- 
ence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, 
and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur 
not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you 
have entered, be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss." 
But Ingersoll places both David Hume and Thomas Jefferson in hell. 
Conceding the most, they were Deists, and accepted the Deist's 
Bible, which teaches that there is a supreme God, that he is to be 
worshipped, that the principal part of his worship is virtue, that men 
ought to repent of sin, and that there are rewards and punishments 
here and hereafter. Thomas Paine, notwithstanding all his scur- 
rilous infidel clatter, accepted these beliefs, and they are entirely too 
much to suit Ingersoll, who reduces everything to a " don't know; " 
so down he plunges Hume and Jefferson and Paine into the sul- 
phurous pit of his pagan perdition. Of course, we would expect to 
find Voltaire in this category. Toward the last, dark despondency 
settled down upon Voltaire. He says, in one place: "Strike out a 
few sages, and the crowd of human beings is nothing but a horrible 
assemblage of unfortunate criminals, and the globe contains nothing 
but corpses. I wish I had never been born." This lets out altogether 
too much of the inside gloom and despair of atheism, so Ingersoll 
hides Voltaire out of sight in the bottomless deeps of Tartarus. 
There is Diderot ; notwithstanding his blatant atheism, he let 
in some aggravating admissions into the famous Encyclopedia, 



52 



such as this: " To speak rigorously, Jesus Christ was not a philoso- 
pher; he was a God." Diderot also said, on one occasion: "I 
defy you all, as many as are here, to prepare a tale so simple and so 
touching, as the tale of the passion and death of Jesus Christ, whose 
influence will be the same after so many centuries." Auguste 
Comte was another dogmatic atheist. He established the Religion 
of Humanity, which shares with Mormonism such honors as the 
nineteenth century will good naturedly bestow upon the two new 
religions which it has brought forth. But Comte provided nine 
sacraments for the proper observance of the worship of Collective 
Humanity, and religious observances which would consume two 
hours every day. These things cause Mr. Ingersoll to bite his irre- 
ligious lips with vexation; but now Ingersoll is even with both 
Diderot and Comte; he has condemned them to the murky abysses 
of Pluto. There, too, he sends Goethe, who said: " It is a belief in 
the Bible which has served me as the guide of my moral and liter- 
ary life." Shakespeare, who drew both the materials and the inspir- 
ation for his work from the Bible. Robert Burns, who wrote that 
immortal tribute to true religion, " The Cotter's Saturday Night." 
Charles Dickens, who, in his last will and testament, dated May 
12, 1869, said: "I commit my soul to the mercy of God through 
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children 
humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New 
Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man's 
narrow construction of its letter here or there." Longfellow, who 
sang of " The faith that overcometh doubt," and whose poems, 
from beginning to end, are saturated with Christian belief. Emerson, 
who, among his latest utterances, said : " I admit that you shall 
find a good deal of skepticism in the streets and hotels and places 
of coarse amusement. Where there is depravity, there is a 
slaughter-house style of thinking. One argument of future life is 
the recoil of the mind in such company— our pain at every 
skeptical statement." George Eliot, who, in a lately published 



53 



letter, dated NovemDer 26, 1862, expresses her deep conviction 
of the efficacy of all sincere belief, and of the moral aridity which 
follows the loss of it, and then says : " In fact, I have very little 
sympathy with the clan of Freethinkers, and I have lost all interest 
in merely anti-religious polemics." John Stuart Mill, who wrote that 
remarkable testimony concerning Christ : " Whatever else is taken 
away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left — an unique 
figure. * * * * Religion cannot be said to have made a bad 
choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide 
of humanity; nor even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, 
to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into 
the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve 
our life." All these Mr. Ingersoll consigns to the ghastly perdition 
of his much-lauded paganism; and I do not wonder at it. Fairly 
representing the beliefs and teachings of those whose authority he 
so misuses, it is not difficult to make out that he himself is either a 
fool or a knave. 

The Substitute for Christianity. 

Last of all, but most important, what has Mr. Ingersoll to offer 
as a substitute for the faith which he seeks to destroy. He appears 
to be eloquent in advocating infidelity. Either success and ap- 
plause stimulate him to the cultivation of a spurious eloquence, or 
the aftershine of his early religious training has not lost its lustre. 
For, as Charles Hare so pungently remarks, " There is no being 
eloquent for atheism. In that exhausted receiver, the mind cannot 
use its wings — the clearest proof that it is out of its element." He 
advocates "the religion of good clothes and good wages." Just 
at present, in the oil country, Ingersoll's religion would have to 
take a vacation. He offers "good fellowship;" but up in Connecti- 
cut, a man who pursued infidelity through its bewilderment, its 



54 



darkness and its despair, on returning to the friendly fireside of 
faith, said to his minister, one day: " I tell you what it is, you may 
take all the skeptics in this State and squeeze them, and you can not 
get out of them so much of the real milk of human kindness as 
there is in any one of your old blue deacons here." Mr. Ingersoll 
criticises, very severely, what religion is doing in the world; what is 
infidelity doing? After the Reign of Terror, La Reveillere Le- 
paux, the First Man of the Directory, concocted a scheme for a new 
religion, to be called Theophilanthropism, because it was to em- 
brace the love of God and man. He submitted his plan to Talley- 
rand, and asked his opinion of it. Talleyrand's reply was: "That 
is all very well; now the only thing is to get it in operation. To 
establish Christianity Jesus Christ died and rose again; supposing 
you try something of the same kind." What will Mr. Ingersoll do 
to establish his religion of humanity and reciprocity, that is so 
much superior to Christianity? He derives considerable profit from 
his lectures written and uttered; he may be using his ample means 
for the benefit of hundreds of infidel hospitals and orphan asylums 
and other charitable institutions, just as Moody and Sankey did with 
the immense royalty on their " Gospel Hymns." If so, it is a perfect 
shame that piratical publishers should issue unauthorized reports 
of his lectures for their own pecuniary profit. It might be sup- 
posed that the fundamental principles of infidel morality would re- 
strain them from such a breach of "reciprocity." Mr. Ingersoll is 
justified in denouncing them, although it shakes our faith somewhat 
in the happiness and "reciprocity" that we were led to suppose 
reigned supreme in the infidel camp. But notice the language of 
his denunciation, as printed in his " Note to the Public " that ap- 
pears with his authorized report of this very lecture we are consid- 
ering. "I wish," he says, "to notify the public that all books and 
pamphlets purporting to contain my lectures, and not containing the 
imprint of " (here he names his publisher) " are spurious, grossly 
inaccurate, filled with mistakes, horribly printed, and outrageously 



55 



unjust to me." Now, supposing some one took this authorized 
report of the lecture on." Orthodoxy," and sparing no pains or ex- 
pense, produced an accurate, but much handsomer pamphlet typo- 
graphically, we might admit that that pamphlet was spurious and 
unjust to Mr. Ingersoll; but, according to his statement, it would be 
"grossly inaccurate, filled with mistakes, and horribly printed." 
This is only a passing glance at the workings of his logical mind. 

But, now that Mr. Ingersoll has quite a number of lectures on 
hand, how would it do for him to settle down somewhere and 
deliver them, or such others as he might be able to produce, once 
or twice on Sunday, to such a congregation as he could gather 
and keep together ? He might thus found a Church devoted to the 
promulgation of his " Religion of Humanity." Mr. Frothingham, it 
is true, gave up that experiment in despair; but there is Felix 
Adler, bravely at work, and commanding the respect, at least, of all 
fair-minded people. And one of the definite aims which Mr. Inger- 
soll might keep before him in this undertaking, would be this, for 
instance, to build up an infidel, or agnostic (if he should prefer that 
term) society, the standard of whose morality should be so high, and 
their lives so blameless that it would be an item of startling intelli- 
gence, which the Associated Press would eagerly telegraph the 
country over, if any of their members should chance to fall into 
open and flagrant sin; for this much, at least, religion has done for 
all our churches. Gough's challenge to temperance workers of 
divergent views is excellent: " Pitch in anywhere; there's splendid 
fighting all along the line." Let the infidels do the same; only it 
may be well to remember that, as the world is getting along a little 
in years, infidelity will have to prove, without a great deal longer 
delay, that it is the great blessing which its friends claim it to be; 
otherwise it is liable to be unceremoniously hustled out of the way 
along with sundry other obstacles to the world's progress. 



I U Ml 



021 898 625 



1121131 



x._ \ XXX X X \ X X X X \ 



eeeeeeeew-sBBajeaeaeBeBtieeeeBeeBeeBeaeBeBeeeBeaeeBB 

X X X 

There is no unbelief: 
Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod, 
And waits to see it push away the clod, 
He trusts in God. 

Whoever says, when clouds are in the sky, 
" Be patient, heart; light breaketh hy-and-by," 
Trusts the Most High. 

Whoever lies down on his couch to sleep, 
Content to lock each sense in slumber deep, 
Knows God will keep. 

The heart that looks on when the eyelids close, 
And dares to live when life has only woes, 
God's comfort knows. 

There is no unbelief: 

And day by day, and night, unconsciously, 
The heart lives by that faith the lips deny— 
God knoweth why/ 



